The French publication Ouest-France published an interview with Magran - our resident, head of the Tvorche Nezhyt gallery, and curator of the DRUK artistic direction, where he told his story - the second war in 10 years, moving from Syria to Kharkiv, the desire to develop young artists and the Tvorche Nezhyt gallery. Ouest-France is a French newspaper founded in 1944. It has more than 2.5 million readers.
A young Syrian, whose family fled the war and found refuge in Kharkiv, was once again caught up in the war. Magran, a 21-year-old architecture student, opened a small art gallery at DRUK's cultural and community center for local artists to exhibit their work.
At first, this place seems abandoned. Upstairs, if you go up the old staircase, there is a large room, recently painted white, in which about twenty works of art are displayed.
"We also printed them on cards with poems on the back," says Magran, gesturing to the desk that serves as a workspace. The works belong to a local artist. The opening took place a few days ago, and it was an opportunity for Kharkiv artists to gather in the evening to meet each other outside of the war context, even if the air alarms sound here many times a day.
For Magran, the war did not start in February 2022 and even not in 2014, when Crimea was annexed. He was born in Aleppo to a Syrian father and a Ukrainian mother. Along with his parents and two brothers, Magran had to flee Syria at the start of the war in 2012 to find refuge with his mother's family in Kharkiv. Throughout his teenage years in Kharkiv, Magran imagined that he would quickly return to Syria: “I thought every year that I would return. My mom told me it would happen after college, then after high school, then after university... And in the end, I'm still here."
"It is true that in 2022 I was a little ahead of my friends because it was already my second war. After seeing how the Russians acted, I immediately said that this would be the case in Ukraine for years."
At the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Kharkiv became the scene of numerous bombings and battles, when Russian troops tried to capture Ukraine's second-largest city. At that time, Magran lived with his parents in Saltivka, a working-class residential area in the northeast of Kharkiv, which was heavily bombed. He recalls: "Then the buildings next to our house were deliberately attacked by the Russians. Civilians were the targets of the strikes - it was done to scare us into fleeing or surrendering."
For several months, Magran and his family left Kharkiv to hide in a quieter village in the region. At the time, the young man still had a few Russian friends whom he met through online video games, but the rift between them grew quickly: all of them put "Z" in the profile picture on their phones, and some explained to Magran that he would soon be "liberated" by the Russians troops: "I realized at that moment that the problem is not with Vladimir Putin or his government but with Russia as a whole."
In the summer of 2022, the architecture student returned to the still deserted Kharkiv: "There was no one there, we could walk on the highways. But gradually, young people began to return, because this is a student city ‒ and that's when we tried to revive the culture in the city."
Together with his art student friends, Magran applied to local and international institutions to receive funding for cultural projects. He talks about the street exhibitions (which did not last long) and about the name Tvorche Nezhyt that their group chose for themselves. "We wanted the art to spread quickly, everywhere, like an epidemic," he explains.
The war delayed the implementation of his gallery project, but seeing how few artistic spaces there were in Kharkiv, Magran decided to start: "I wasn't going to wait for a nuclear war anyway...". Although this initiative has an artistic nature, war is still present in it: every opening or event is an opportunity to raise funds for the Armed Forces. At 21, Magran knows he may have to go to war, too. For now, the status of a student exempts him from this.
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